660. MLK's Equality vs Modern Equity: I Have a Dream Speech Explained

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. So we are rocking and rolling into the new year, into January.

And one thing that I think we always associate with January, and maybe it's because we had a day off, but one thing that the holiday that I think we think of other than New Year's when we think of January is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the day we observe that. So I want to talk about that. And I want to talk about it in terms of quality.

And I want to talk about what Martin Luther King Jr. meant when he talked, when he spoke of equality, because that message is, is getting really distorted today. And it's a little bit concerning. And so I want to talk about that.

And you know, what we can do now to restore that really great message that that he he spread back in the day. So we are all somewhat familiar with Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech, it was, you know, very important and very beautifully written speech. But you know, what was that dream? And why does it sometimes feel like we talk about the equality that Dr. King spoke of very differently today? And why is that? And we can't put words in in Dr. King's mouth, because he's no longer here.

But you know, I do wonder what he would think about what has happened today and and how we should, how we should feel about that. Because even though it might not feel like it, with what social justice has looked like today, back in the civil rights movement that Dr. King was a part of, you know, his dream, what he spoke of was actually very similar to what we speak about here, what we speak about on this podcast, you know, and what is taught in the Telltale Twins books about merit, and about this, this true equality. So I want to read you my favorite line in I have a dream speech.

And that is, I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. And that is such a powerful line. And really, that's merit, it down to its core, right, the content of their character, who they are as people, what their special and unique gifts and talents are.

So this dream, this was centered on a colorblind equality, right, judging people not by the color of their skin, but by who they are, like I just said, by their unique, you know, skills. And this idea really matches what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, right, that that all men are created equal. And I really implore you to go back and listen to the episode I did on equality, because I had just read this really great book that talked about how that line that all men are created equal was really the the axiom, the point of reason that all our other rights began with.

And so it's so important. And even though the founders and the framers did not fully realize that dream, I believe that they did understand what it meant. And it took, you know, the culture, hearts and minds had to change before slavery was done away with.

But as we all know, slavery is abhorrent, and it is the opposite of liberty. So they were flawed men. Spoiler alert, all humans are flawed.

So but it does what Martin Luther King said really does echo back to what Thomas Jefferson said, which I think is really powerful, because he is calling on that saying, like, I'm an American who also believes in the American dream. So I think that's really important. So let's talk about what equality means.

And the way to put it simply is that true liberty and true equality means that we have equal opportunity, not equal outcomes, right? And that we don't see people by what we call immutable characteristics. And what immutable means is, I'm not judging you on whether or not you should get a scholarship because you're, you know, I'm not looking at your gender. I'm not looking at your race.

And things have gotten a little switch today, right? Now, it's this idea that we actually do have to consider race, but you're wrong if you can say it's you have to consider some races now at some races to get more privilege because people were, you know, slavery existed and, you know, Black people did have a lot of oppression back in the day, but it's trying to erase or make up for past oppression by current oppression by now giving, you know, maybe, you know, maybe Black people were rights than white people on certain things or more. I don't want to say rights, more opportunities. Okay, so more opportunities, not rights.

Everybody should have the same rights, but we'll get there too. So bear with me. Let's move on.

Just a brief bio on who Martin Luther King was. So he was born in 1929 in Atlanta, deep south. He was a pastor.

He was a philosopher and he was a civil rights leader. Today, civil rights is called social justice, but they are not the same thing. You'll see that kind of morphed, but we'll go into that later.

He was inspired by Frederick Douglass, you know, the Declaration of Independence and the same natural rights that John Locke talked about that helped build this country. And so he led the Montgomery bus boycott. He led the March on Washington.

He led, you know, many powerful peaceful protests because if there was one thing he understood, it was the power of peaceful protests. He knew that if violence erupted, it was not going to help the cause. And don't get me wrong, I think that, I think it would be justified for them to have gotten a little rowdy because when you don't have the same rights as everybody else in your own country, especially when you're going off and you've helped fight in their wars.

I mean, that, that is a, a feeling I can't even imagine. And you know, we talk about the sons of liberty during the revolution, getting a little rowdy and we justified a little bit. And so you kind of think like, okay, maybe they would have been justified, but you also remember people like John Adams and people who were very, uh, they were proponents of peace that you have to have these peaceful protests to show people that you're serious and to show people that you're not just a, you know, rebel rousers.

So nonviolence, very important to him, persuasion through very powerful words. And oh my goodness, Martin Luther King was a brilliant writer and a amazing orator. He gave great speeches.

And so he wanted to appeal to Americans shared values because we, again, are all Americans. And so we all have this foundation that is very similar. And so he didn't want to tear down America.

He wanted America to live up to its own promises. And I think that is so important. And that's why he, he called upon the declaration of independence to say, all men are created equal.

And I would like that promise to be realized. And now is the time for that to be realized. So it's really powerful and it's so different now because now we see this attack on America.

You have, oh, what was it, the 1619 project. You have every, you have people seeing the world only through the lens of racism. And so they're saying America has always been racist, has always been this.

And again, we do not, you know, we, we do not want to glaze over the very, very real horrific instances of slavery. Slavery is not compatible with, with liberty at all. But there's, there's history is awful and violent and brutish, and there have been wars and there've been all these terrible things.

And the best thing we can do now is to really take on those lessons and those wisdoms and incorporate them and be better. And how to be better in terms of, of racism is to see everybody equal, to be colorblind, to see a person as who they are and what they bring to the table and nothing else. That should be the only thing that matters.

You know, and at the heart of MLK's message was equal treatment and not special treatment and that everybody should play by the same rules. And that is kind of the key of the 14th amendment where there's the equal protection clause. And what that says is not that some people should be elevated over others.

It's that, no, it's that the law sees everybody as equal, no special treatment based on something silly like, oh, well, you're a girl. Okay. You get away with that.

Or, oh, you're this race. No. Or you're this religion.

No, that doesn't, that has nothing to do with anything because none of us choose what race we're born. We don't choose what gender we're born. We are born a certain way.

And so we shouldn't be, you know, we shouldn't be targeted or we shouldn't be punished for that and we shouldn't be given privileges for that. So that goes both ways. Everybody needs to play by the same rules and your opportunity needs to come from your character, from your effort, from your choices, right? That's a big one.

And not from what you look like. So this is really big. This is something that, you know, we talk about in Tuttle Twins all the time because we have, there's like the glare, I'm trying to make sure you can see it.

You have the Medals of Merit book, which I think is really, really great. And we talked about it again, if you want to go back and find that episode we did on merit. But what is merit? Merit is the clout, the skills, the reputation, the good things that you have built because of your own gifts and talents, right? So getting into a good school because you worked hard and you had the grades and you really poured your heart into it and you got the results, not, well, I come from a group that was previously, you know, oppressed or discriminated against and so I should get into college.

And we saw recently there was a case against Harvard and students for fair admissions. And this was a group of students who was getting very concerned because Asian students were being looked at less seriously, or even, I'm going to actually say it more powerful than that. Asian American students were being discriminated against when it came to getting into Harvard.

So instead of looking at everybody without looking at a gender, without looking at race, the school was actually giving special treatment to other students of different races and targeting Asian students. So much so that there's a prep, a college prep group, and they actually wore, they gave advice to Asian students. They said, try not to sound Asian on your application.

Don't say you like math or engineering. They were doing all these stereotypes or they were saying, because if Harvard sees that or other Ivy League, that's the really prestigious colleges, if they see that, they're less likely to accept you. And how horrible it is to have to hide who you are.

And especially, you know, we could get into the horrific history of, of Chinese Americans and, and Japanese Americans. They were interns. So there's all, every, every race has different ways.

They were oppressed or, or, or, you know, discriminated against. And if we have this discrimination Olympics where we just keep trying to say, well, I was more oppressed than you were. That's not healthy.

It's not positive. Why don't we move forward and say, no, let's just have everybody be considered the same. And so this lawsuit was great because the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do this.

You can't consider race. You have to judge people based on their merit, affirmative action. That is where you give, you affirm, you give them more rights or more privileges, not rights, more privileges because of their race.

This was put into place for a very brief period of time, Supreme Court case rules in favor of this, that basically said we need to correct for some certain past discrimination. So for a certain period of time, we'll do this, but then they never took it away. So this new case reversed that and said, no, no, we can't do this.

And that was great. But spoiler alert, Harvard and other schools are still looking for loopholes on how they can do this without saying they're doing it. So the fight is ongoing, but this goes against everything that Martin Luther King stood for.

This is not his message. And suddenly it's became, it's, you know, it's gotten twisted. And now people are saying, no, Martin Luther King thought that we should all have equal outcomes.

And what we call this idea of equal outcomes, we call that equity. And it's pretty, it's pretty sneaky that equality and equity sound so similar because now they're kind of used interchangeably and there's all these, you know, diversity and equity practices. And when you hear equity, it does not mean equality.

It usually means the exact opposite. So equality in terms of what MLK meant and what the founders meant, it was the equality was about fairness in that equality is about sameness. And that's going to sound weird to you.

So I'm going to break this down. And it's, it's funny because when the founders talked about, you know, all men are created equal. Some people in some journalists and some pamphlets in Britain laughed at this because they were saying all men are created equal, but I'm tall and you're short.

How silly, silly Americans. They don't know what they're talking about, but really it was like silly Britons because you didn't understand the deeper message here. We are not all the same.

I might be better at something than you are. You might be better at something than I am not. You might, you probably absolutely are because we all are unique individual people with amazing skills and talents.

That's why we marvel at people who are great singers. If we're not great singers or dancers or chess players, whatever it may be, because it's great that we have all this diversity of merit, diversity of skill, not diversity of immutable characteristics like race or gender. So equality does not discount that we are all different.

In fact, equality protects that we are all different by saying no matter how different we are, all the rules of government, all the privileges and all the rights, they have to apply to us equally. We are all the same in the eyes of the government. Now that doesn't mean we're the same in the eyes of a, you know, um, of a college admissions board or of a soccer team that you have to try out for.

No, we're different there, but we have to be treated the same by government. The law applies to everybody equally. Full stop.

Martin Luther King's message matters more today probably than it ever has before because it feels like during the civil rights movement, you know, we heard this and it was, well, I didn't hear it. I was not born, not that old, but you know, people heard this and it really resonated with them and it helped change the world because hearts and minds had to be changed for real change to occur in society. But now something over the last, you know, 10, 15 years, although it's been brewing a lot longer than that, has happened where now, now we're not having those shared American values.

Now it's like very anti-American in its own way. It's saying like America was built on racism, has always been racist, there is a systemic racism. And let's be honest, the government has always been oppressive.

Again, I'm going to say full stop. The government has always been oppressive and it's been equally oppressive. It did that correctly.

It's been equally oppressive to everybody. We don't need to have a contest on who's been more oppressed and who hasn't. The government oppresses people on a daily basis, which is why it is so important that our rights are applied equally, that they cannot take it away from some and others.

The whole goal here, you know, we act today, people act like it's, you know, races against other races. And really the fight has always been people fighting for their rights against the government. That's the common enemy.

And somehow it's gotten so distorted and we feel very racially divided as a country right now where we shouldn't, we should feel more, more united than ever, especially after things like the pandemic showed us how much the government was willing to take away from us. So I want us to remember this Martin Luther King, you know, day, the day that we observe, you know, and honor his memory, that MLK believed that justice should be colorblind, that the way our government operates should be colorblind, that equality is colorblind, that we shouldn't be looking at these groups we just happen to belong to because we were born a certain way. That's not what it's about.

You know, we need to respect everyone, we need to treat people with fairness, we need to judge others by their actions, by their choices, by their merit, and not their race that we are. We need to be judged by the content of our character, what a powerful message that is. So you're going to hear a lot of distorted views of MLK's message this this year and all the time.

But, you know, around this time of year, especially. And just remember that that's not what this is about. And I don't think that's what Martin Luther King would have wanted or would have agreed with either.

So good, good conversations to talk about with your family at the dinner table. And yeah, like, what does equality mean to you guys? What do you think it means to your neighborhood, to your people around you, to your schools? Talk about it. So I will leave it there.

As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.